One of the features of the Sounds of the Cultural Quarter app is that we have attempted to recreate sounds of the past as well as capturing sounds of the present. Where we haven't been able to do this ourselves we have had to seek help and this blog post is a 'thank you' to all those who have assisted us in the creation of the app. First, thank you to all the individuals who recorded sound on their mobile phones and sent them to us. Second, while other blog posts have thanked Leicester Transport Heritage Trust and Halford Shoes, these are the other organisations and companies who have been so helpful:

Recently (2nd August 2014) I headed out of Leicester on the 153 bus towards Kirby Muxloe and Desford. I was on my way to meet Richard Worman and the volunteers of the Leicester Transport Heritage Trust and the fantastic buses which they restore and preserve.

One of the key buildings in the Cultural Quarter is the LCB Depot, a former bus depot and control centre of Leicester City Transport (LCT, later Leicester CityBus LCB). Opened on the 9th March 1969, the Rutland Street operating centre was the base of operations for management and logistics of the bus network in Leicester. The company pioneered the use of CCTV television cameras and VHF radios to monitor and communicate between the drivers and control centre, leading to an efficient and flexible service.

This was also the base of operations for all drivers who would sign in and out to begin and end shifts and count up the fares they had collected during the shift. The building had social areas and a cafeteria and was the hub of the bus community allowing drivers to meet and socialise.

Out in Desford I was transported back in time by the fantastic and pristine restoration work of the excellent Leicester Transport Heritage Trust members. I swiftly set up my recording equipment and thanks to Richard and his colleagues began to explore the sounds of the buses. Each had its own distinctive voice with unique engine notes and individual hiss and air sounds as the doors swung open.

I had the chance to experience:

1950 Leyland PD2 – a separate conductor and driver for this type of bus with passenger access via the step at the back.

1972 Metro Scania single decker bus – LCT was one of the first companies to employ this type of bus within the UK

1982 Dennis Dominator – specified and part designed by the director of LCT Geoffrey Hilditch, Leicester took a large number of these buses into service. So they would have been a frequent visitor to the Rutland Street depot. Listen to the sound of a Dennis Dominator bus parking here.

Having a chance to hear and record these buses really helped me to envisage the soundscape of the Rutland Street control centre, and the local area, and to understand how important these sounds were to the historical soundscape and how iconic they would have been for the people who worked there.

On entering the tunnel into the depot, drivers would beep their horn to signal their approach. Richard was kind enough to re-enact this for our soundscape. Listen to the sound of a bus entering the depot here.

The Leicester Transport Heritage Trust keep this key element of Leicester heritage alive. While I was there they kindly downed tools while we recorded but are usually undertaking sterling work to restore these iconic vehicles. While re-upholstering a bus seat they discovered an old LCT bus ticket which they gave to me as a memento.

This recording visit gave me a really tangible sense of this oft forgotten part of Leicester heritage.

While I have been pounding the streets of the Cultural Quarter, asking people to record the sounds around them on mobile phones, I have also been doing some recording myself. The best collection of sounds I found today came from the various machines in Halford Shoes at 38 Halford Street. In 1969 this shop was Hartley's Corn Stores (for which we have no sound), but the current business cuts keys, mends shoes, and does engraving too. The machines that do this make a wonderful variety of cutting and grinding noises and this is your guide to the sounds I recorded.

First, the sound of the doorbell as you enter the shop. Then, the key cutter, the compressor (with the sound of the doorbell towards the end), and the slightly quieter sole and heel press. The much louder finishing machine starts at full pelt but slows down and, finally, the engraving machine rounds it off.

Sounds are all around us, but we very rarely stop and listen to what we can hear. Sounds can tell us the story of what's going on in an area:

How much is going on?

What type of activities are taking place?

How do these activities change over time (for example: how do the sounds change over the course of a day?).

Sounds leave us with a visceral impression of human activities, the 'goings on' in a certain place at a particular point in time.

What are we doing?

We're digging back through the archives to try and work out what the Cultural Quarter would have sounded like between 1950 – 1990. And, with your help, we're seeking to create a contemporary archive of the sounds of the Cultural Quarter today.

What sounds do you hear when you:

Come to work in the Cultural Quarter?

Come home?

Visit the theatre or cinema?

Pop out for some shopping?

Grab a drink at the bars?

Have dinner in one of the restaurants?

Take part in one of the street festivals / events?

We're looking for the sounds that most stick in your mind and those that are most important to you. What sounds are iconic to this area? Help us build an archive that people will be able to look back on in 50 years time and compare with their future soundscape.

Why are we so interested in sound?

Photographs and maps provide physical evidence of the past, but these can only tell us what things looked like at a specific snapshot in time, often from the outside. Sounds can give us a much richer understanding of an area, telling us what is happening out of sight (around corners or within buildings) and what happens over a period of time.

But sounds are also ephemeral. They exist only while the action causing them lasts and then they fade away. So many of the past sounds of the Cultural Quarter have been lost forever.

But with help from participants and members of the public coming forward to share their experiences of the Cultural Quarter, we have begun to build up a picture of what the Cultural Quarter would have once sounded like.

What will be the end result?

We've been visiting museums and factories to collect the sounds of machinery, of buses, of sirens and we are bringing all of these sounds together into an interactive mapping application.

We're going to reconstruct the sounds of the Cultural Quarter as it would have been prior to regeneration, shedding new light on the activities that took place there. And creating an interactive experience that will allow users to explore the sounds of the Cultural Quarter (past and present) to discover something new about this diverse and ever evolving sector of the town.

Get Involved

If you work, rest or play in the Cultural Quarter today, why not use your phone (or other gadget) to send us an audio recording of any sounds that you find interesting?

If you have experience of the area in the past (when it was known as St Georges) then please get in touch with us and let us know of any interesting sounds / experiences that you remember in the area.

More information – for more information on soundscapes you might find this TED talk interesting. Bernie Krause talks about the sounds of nature Biophony (though of course in this project we're interested in the sounds of humans – Anthrophony).

For information about recording (equipment and ideas) check out this great page from the organisation Sound and Music: